Prima Doll

Attachment 1975

"Café "Kuronekotei" boasts an unusual roster of employees. A group of automata, or autonomous mechanical dolls, serve their patrons with a smile, but they weren't always so suited to domestic life. Just a few years prior, automata served as weapons in the great war, fulfilling the bloody purpose for which they were created. Now that the war has ended, these machines with human hearts search for their place in an unfamiliar, peaceful world — and their search begins at the Kuronekotei café.

Source: Sentai Filmworks

Note: The show premiered on Abema starting from July 3, ahead of the regular TV broadcast on July 9."

Genre(s): Drama, Slice of life, Sci-fi, Supernatural

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It has been discussed already in the impressions thread, so here's the dedicated one. I liked it. The heartstring tug teetered over the edge into tryhard territory, but the story was still tender and set the tone quite well. Usually these Key series spend half of their runtime setting up the rug-pulling tragedy and then summons the ensemble to clean up the mess for the last arc, but maybe they are gearing up for episodic cry-bait instead? We shall see... Cute character designs and good animation. The war dolls thing is played out but isn't (yet) any more out of place than in any other series where military might is or was established by the historically unstoppable force of lolis.

2

I think I might be done with Prima Doll. A little too milquetoast for me, and the deadpan loli didn't help. Maybe worth watching later after a narrative forms, but the faffing about right now makes this only slightly the best 'girls eating and talking' show of the season.

Meh. It's cute. Which is good enough for me until the plot gets more serious.

My major gripes are:
- If they're automata, why do they eat? (both episodes)
- Why or how do they remove their steampunk backpacks when the sleep? (Haizakura in eps 2) I kinda figured those were their power plants and thus integral to their construction.

Prima Doll has started to get VERY good. Violet Evergarden crossed with Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka, with a little bit of Eve no Jikan.

It's a slow burn for sure. The first 4 episodes are pretty boring. But it has been deeply methodical unveiling of what's actually going on in the setting.

Our perspective is with the dolls, who are all post-war veterans and trying to find their new place that Nagi (a veteran himself) has carved out for them, so all the deeper stuff slowly gets hinted at after the initial episodes that set the initial tone. What has been teased is essentially a covert civil war/coup within a country that was victorious in their decades long war with another country. A war that left both sides fairly broken.

Maybe I'll have to pick this back up, then.